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403 acting shot 1 character

Posted on January 30, 2007  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation Mentor

403.jpg
Here is my latest assignment. I am very unhappy about the blocking but once you are in polishing it is too late to go back to it. I am now trying to make the most of it and learn from my mistakes.

Stretchy rig or broken Bishop?

Posted on January 27, 2007  | 2 Comments
Filed under Animation Mentor

broken-rig.jpg

Just when I am under pressure guess what I have to cope with…. look at his left arm and his ankle. This is what happen when a rig doesn’t want to behave…. Bishop has been severly bruised for not doing what I ordered him to do!

Hum… how do I fix that now? 😐

(it is interesting how much traffic this page is getting… a torrent of traffic actually 😉 )

Progress reel

Posted on January 16, 2007  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation Mentor

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let’s face it. I haven’t touched any of the shots for the past 3 month so I might as well just post it for real this time. There is still a lot of work but once I put it online I won’t have any excuses not to improve it anymore.

Do you see my title here?

Posted on January 11, 2007  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Miscellaneous

I need to blog about this. I went to get a credit card at the Natwest Earl’s court branch for a friend of mine who lives abroad and was told to ask for a specific member of staff.

When I enquired about it at the Information Desk I got told that I would need a letter to pick up a credit card.

I explained the situation very carefully and clearly and the fact that I was told to speak with a very specific member of the staff but she said the same thing: “no letter, no card”.

I don’t really have time to hang around in Banks and before heading home asked her if she was sure about it to which she replied.

“Do you see my title here?” pointing at her name tag…. It reads V. F. Customer Service Officer.

I am not too sure what kind of customer service we are talking about here but certainly not the kind of customer service I will ever want to be treated with. A person with a condescending attitude to me has got nothing to do with customer service.

Natwest Earl’s court don’t expect me to recommend you to anyone.

Back at AM

Posted on January 10, 2007  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation Mentor

I am finally back at Animation Mentor after a break of 3 month. What did I do during that time? I think I made the most of it.

I spent 8 weeks with Keith Lango and the APT program, I tried to learn Zbrush and Maya a bit better, I also spent a bit of time with XSI and met plenty of great people.

I caught up with my friend Richard Helliwell (which I first met during the Anatomy for digital artists at Escape), Young Min, who used to work for me and who introduced me to Seung Ho Henrik Holmberg. Check out his blog http://henrik.cgcommunity.com/ he is a very talented artist who at 26 years old already worked for ILM, Dreamworks and now MPC. Yep… just that. I also met plenty of other crazy people that I won’t mention or you wouldn’t believe me. Let’s say that Soho is a very small place.
New year, new resolutions. Sleeping less, working harder! I even applied for an IT job at MPC but haven’t heard from them yet. I am trying an mad schedule, bed at 2am, wake up at 6am. Like I keep repeating to people who question my sanity, “if DJ can do it, why can’t I do it????” Well, I only started yesterday night and I am already feeling very tired 😉
Keith’s APT was excellent, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who really wants to push his animation skills forward. I didn’t have too much time for it unfortunately but I feel that he helped me greatly. I am much more confident now to approach a new shot. I finally know where I am going and I don’t feel lost like before.

My new mentor at AM this term is ex CalArt student Morgan Kelly http://www.morgankelly.blogspot.com/ who currently works at Dreamworks. I loved Flushed Away and hopefully he worked on it. Tonight 5am GMT is our first Q&A. Not too sure how I am gonna wake up yet but I will.

My Class3 one character shot really sucked but we will see how it goes.

I am also finishing some work on www.monza-interiors.co.uk and hopefully the website will go live tonight. I mainly worked on the backend and Sergio provided the template. It is the first time I am relying entirely on CSS for the design and I even tried a bit of Ajax. It is hopefully the last time I get involved into such a project and from now on I intend to only stick to 3d work. Animation obviously and also Modeling if possible. Mudbox, Zbrush, Modo2 made modeling so approachable that it would be a shame not to give it a try.
Regarding drawing, I won’t go to life drawing classes anymore as the ones here are not suited to animators. I picked up a few books, watched several 2d shots from Jason Ryan and few Glen Villpu lectures, tried my hand at 2d animation and I feel that I am on the verge of discovering the graal. I will tell you more about it later.
Keep an eye on this blog. Things will be revealed to you very soon 😉

Make your own Cintiq

Posted on January 1, 2007  | 2 Comments
Filed under Life hack

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Crazy stuff! Make your own Wacom Cintiq and possibly a tablet PC on the cheap.
I found a very interesting article where a guy is mounting a LCD screen over a Wacom sensor board in order to build a cheap Cintiq. Bare in mind that he only uses second hand parts bought on ebay, like a very old Ultra pad Wacom tablet. It is obviously possible to do it with brand new parts like an Intuos3 and some other people have even transformed their Powerbook into a TabletPC. A real Tablet PC is a bit more than just an lcd over a wacom tablet but that does the trick for most people including me.

I finally found a use for my old UltraPad tablet that was gathering dust for month unless I finally decide to buy a real Table PC.

Here is the link http://www.bongofish.co.uk/wacom/wacom_pt1.html

Linux contribution

Posted on December 25, 2006  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Linux

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Following a discussion on Lugradio.com I thought that I should start contributing to the linux community since I have been using it at work for quite a while now. As a start here is a template I just used to print on my Centos 4.4 server CD. It is a very small contribution but that will do for a start. Works perfectly with my epson CD printing software.

Mirage (edit “TVPaint”)

Posted on December 21, 2006  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Drawings

Mirage

[important update] It appears that what I am mentioning at the end of the post is very serious, as far as I understand it Bauhaus is only a reseller and the French company is the actual creator of Mirage. The last version of Mirage available on Bahaus website is Mirage 1.5 which is not the newest release. The new release has been renamed TVPaint 8.1.1 (do you remember TVPaint?) and it offers features more suited for digital 2d animation. Buying from Bahaus will not allow you to upgrade to the new version and only TVPaint is intelMacs compatible.

Here is the 2d animation software I am testing those days. I have been trying several since the begining of the month in order to improve my drawing skills and hopefully my animation skills and a better understanding on spacing.

Just like every animation mentor students I tried PAP which seem to be the Zbrush of Digital 2d animation. An awfull interface that hides a software which only reveals himself once you get to know how it works. The drawing feeling is great but you can only draw in black or blue. The lack of coloring tool and only one layer just doesn’t do it for me so I tried Toon Boom.

Toon Boom is a cool software because it offers a landscape mode timeline where you hold poses instead of just copying them. Copying is good but if you make changes you would prefer to see them reflected on the held poses instead of deleting them all and copying them back. One great thing too is that you can rotate the workspace. Now one thing that can put people off is the drawing mode. Toon Boom is a vector software so every paintstroke is interpreted in a clean mathematical manner. It is great if you love sharp looking animations with a finished feel to it but not so great if you are the kind of guy who needs to rough stuff up before hand.

Next comes Mirage. I was reluctant at first because of the interface again but after few minutes and going through the various tutorials it doesn’t look so bad anymore and to animate you only need to know few things. I will either make a video very soon or a simple 2d animation tutorial to show you how it works. An animation toolbar is available but it doesnt’ look like it comes with the basic version of Mirage. Rusty Mills explains on his blog how he uses Mirage on his TabletPC (how long will I resist to buy a tabletPC…… ).

At the moment this is my favourite digital animation software. I use it everyday (few weeks left before the trial version expires) to do simple animation tests or sketch full poses, eyes and hand poses. My favourite tool is the size 3 blue crayon.
I won’t encourage you to buy Mirage for the moment as there seem to be a legal issue between french company TV Paint and Mirage. I don’t really know what is the whole story but TVpaint and Mirage are exactly the same software under a different name and color scheme (I have always prefered dark user interfaces though) .

Pocoyo not on Youtube this time

Posted on December 19, 2006  | 1 Comment
Filed under Animation

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Instead of fighting against Pocoyo’s lovers who naively put episodes on Youtube and forgetting about copyright issues, Pocoyo’s production company Zinkia, has decided to put some episodes in much better quality on their own website.

www.pocoyo.com

If you didn’t know about the show. Pocoyo is produced in Spain and you can check Pocoyo’s production blog at http://pocoyo.blogs.com/pocoyo/

Spumco’s Ren and Stimpy revolution

Posted on December 17, 2006  | Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation

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If you want to know a bit more about Ren and Stimpy’s creators, head to http://cin01.blogspot.com/ You will find some scans of a series of Articles about Spumco.

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